Conrad Black - Trump will get what he wants in Iran by negotiation or by force

 We seem finally to have reached the dénouement in the long, extremely one-sided, and comparatively bloodless war the United States and Israel have conducted with Iran. In one month of strategic bombing and missile attacks, the United States and Israel launched 20,000 strikes killing only an alleged 3,500 Iranians but destroying up to 90 per cent of that country’s missile and drone firing capacity and completely destroying its air defences, its navy (apart from a few coastal whalers) and almost all munitions stocks and authentic military targets. Israel suffered approximately 30 civilian deaths from counterattacks, and the United States eight combat fatalities plus five more in a non-combat accident.

There has never in the history of serious combatants been such a one-sided exchange of fire for a whole month. Because of the fragmentation of Iranian leadership, including the death of almost all of the senior cadres of the original Iranian government, the American leadership was persuaded that Iran was prepared to concede the principal US requirements: A complete and permanent end to any Iranian pursuit of a deliverable nuclear warhead, the end of Iranian military assistance to terrorist organisations and of any Iranian claim of a right to block or interfere with international commercial traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

We are now in the eighth week of a two-week cease-fire during which the end of the war was to have been concluded, a cease-fire which has been violated almost every day. Iran has had the impudence, extraordinary even by the egregious standards of the Islamic Republic, to claim to control the Strait of Hormuz and to have fought the United States to an even standstill. 

This is despite the decisive defeat of Iran, and the fact that the United States blockade of Iranian ports has eliminated 90 per cent of Iran’s exports, is costing Iran more than $500 million (€433 million) a day, has impoverished the Iranian regime and inflicted great hardship on that country. It has also had an incidental strategic bonus of, with the effective US takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry, put control of approximately half of China’s oil supply needs in American hands.

The cease-fire was agreed shortly after Pope Leo XIV admonished the president against the threat of destruction of Persian civilisation, when the president suggested that what his senior military personnel call “bridges and powerplant day,” when all such structures in Iran would be destroyed from the air. This was a customary use of Manhattan real estate developers’ hyperbole. Many times throughout these eight weeks, President Trump has announced that peace was at hand and would be concluded within a couple of days, but has always added that the United States would get what it wished either by negotiation or by return to force.

Iran has now broadened its terms to include an end to Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Trump has revealed that the United States has arranged for the export of 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz during the cease-fire and has repeated his frequent assertion that the United States controls that strait and not Iran. Given the correlation of forces, that is not an idle boast. Only insiders are aware of the exact ebb and flow of these discussions but the Iranian technique of promising concessions that are not forthcoming and then making them but not delivering and then violating solemn undertakings, are notorious.

The US president has clearly from time to time restrained the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu from returning to full-scale hostilities. There has been exaggerated emphasis on the partial Congressional elections in the United States in November. It is not at all clear that the administration will suffer a setback in those elections, but it does not much matter if it does. Except for Franklin D. Roosevelt, every two-term president in American history since Theodore Roosevelt, who retired in 1909, has had to deal with a Congress in the hands of his opponents in the last two years. 

None of them had a veto overridden in that time and the consequences of the Democrats regaining control of either or even both houses of Congress will not be significant, especially given their propensity for utterly absurd policy options, including a return to open borders, higher taxes, massive regulation of business, and the imposition of hysterical concerns about the impact on climate of the use of fossil fuels.

Trump has just successfully purged his party of malcontents in the Senate and House of Representatives and not more than four or five presidents in the country’s history have been as preeminent as he is in the politics of the country at this stage in his administration. He has a blank cheque to return to combat and pummel Iran into submission, or to receive Iran’s submission without a return to war.

 He will not make a bad peace and is in a position to extract a satisfactory one. 

The time has come.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/trump-will-get-what-he-wants-in-iran-by-negotiation-or-by-force/